Consolidated Billing and Billing Conductor

Consolidated billing

Consolidated billing is highly recommended in cases where we have multiple AWS accounts. This allows us to take advantage of potential volume discounts and share any Savings Plans or Reserved Instances effectively.

Some organizations have hundreds of accounts, which would be horrible to manage manually one by one, so to help us get better control over our accounts, AWS created AWS Organizations. Organizations are a way to create a grouping of accounts. Each account that is part of an AWS Organization is called a member account. There will also be a management account, which is be where AWS bills the usage for all member accounts.

We can either invite existing accounts to join our AWS Organization structure, or we can create new accounts from within the AWS Organizations console. AWS Organizations offers several other great features. With service control policies, we can restrict the privileges for member accounts. We can also centrally manage and deploy firewall rules across all member accounts at once, but these features are beyond the scope of this course. In this chapter’s walk-through, we'll cover setting up and enforcing tagging policies.

🔍Sidenote: AWS and AWS India operate as separate business entities and cannot be connected. AWS India billing is done in rupees instead of dollars, so those accounts must be grouped together separately with AWS Organizations.